1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, in particular, to a method and apparatus for configuring an operator interface. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method and apparatus for customizing a multicomputer data transfer associated with cookies.
2. Description of Related Art
Privacy has been defined as the right of individuals to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others. Privacy is considered to be an important individual right, and many users of the Internet are aware of privacy rights and related issues.
Although privacy issues have become important concerns of reputable web sites and successful e-commerce companies, many Internet e-commerce sites violate user privacy by collecting user information and then selling it or using it in ways that were not agreed upon by the user. As the amount of e-commerce increases, it is expected that the number of privacy violations will continue to increase.
One method that e-commerce sites are using to gather user information involves the use of cookies, e.g., HTTP cookies (HyperText Transport Protocol). Cookies can be used to gather information about a user's action within a web site or for other purposes. This information is often collected and used without the knowledge or consent of the user of a web site.
Many governmental entities have considered regulating the use of cookies. For example, an e-commerce site might be forbidden to send cookies to a user unless there is full disclosure to the user about the purpose of each cookie. In that case, the e-commerce site would need to drastically reduce or completely eliminate their use of cookies.
However, cookies do serve some useful purposes that do not involve a violation of a user's privacy. For example, some of the basic communication protocols for the World Wide Web were originally designed as stateless protocols. Hence, if a web site were to use only these basic communication protocols, it would be difficult for the web site to provide an interesting experience to a user of the web site, e.g., web pages that have been customized for a particular user based on the user's actions with respect to the web site or movement within the web site. In contrast, cookies allow a web site to maintain state information about a user. In other words, cookies are a good way to keep track of a user session while the user is accessing an e-commerce application. For example, a common use of cookies on e-commerce web sites is an electronic shopping cart feature that assists a user in selecting products for purchase.
There have been some attempts to empower users with control over the use of cookies. For example, many web browsers allow a user to determine certain conditions for accepting cookies. The user of a browser application may enable and disable cookies, and in some instances, the user can request that the browser prompt the user before accepting a cookie, thereby alerting the user to the fact that a web site is attempting to set a cookie on the user's client device. However, if the browser blocks the setting of a cookie on a user's client device, then the web site may return an error message that states that the web site cannot be properly viewed because the user has disabled the use of cookies, thereby denying certain functionality within the web site to the user.
As another example of user control over cookies, a user may employ a privacy service on the World Wide Web that acts as an intermediary for all of the data traffic to and from the user's client device, thereby allowing the privacy service to filter the user's data traffic and to perform certain privacy-enhancing functions on the user's data traffic. One of the privacy-enhancing functions of the privacy service may include blocking the transfer of cookies from a web site to a user's client device by caching cookies at an intermediate server, which then returns the cookies to the appropriate web site as necessary based on the requests that are sent from the client device through the intermediate server. However, these privacy services merely allow the user to switch on and off the cookie blocking/caching functionality. There may be occasions or environments in which a user may want more flexibility in the user's control over these types of privacy services than the mere ability to cache cookies at the intermediate server.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to have a method and a system that provides flexibility to a user such that the user has a finer granularity of control over cookie filtering capabilities.